THE NATION; Go Ahead, Try to Stop K Street

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: January 8, 2006

IN 1872, some Republican elders, revolted by the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, challenged him for re-election. ''He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence,'' they complained, and ''shown himself deplorably unequal to the task imposed on him by the necessities of the country.''

Jack Abramoff's trading room was his Signatures restaurant, not the front of the old Willard Hotel, where favor seekers so besieged Grant that he helped popularize the label -- lobbyist -- that still clings to their descendants with a pejorative sting. But Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea last week to charges of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials prompted similar revulsion among some of the Grand Old Party's canniest hands.

''I think as this thing unfolds, it'll be so disgusting, and the Republicans will be under such pressure from their base, that they will have to undertake substantial reform,'' said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker (who himself had to pay $300,000 to settle a 1997 ethics case). ''This is like Watergate.''

But will things really change? After all, Grant himself won a second term, despite the failings that would eventually leave his legacy forever tainted, and his chief Republican antagonist, Horace Greeley, died defeated and insane three weeks after the election. Is corruption just a part of Washington's DNA? What else explains the grim resignation of Washington veterans who wonder when, not whether, some scandal will arise?

''The history of civilization, for starters,'' said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an ethics group. ''This kind of problem is faced by all societies throughout all of history. It comes and goes in cycles, and becomes most prevalent when the activities are viewed as O.K. by the society where it's taking place.''

For watchdogs like Mr. Wertheimer, and for many Democrats, such tolerance dates to the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990's, when new leaders like Representative Tom DeLay of Texas began a campaign to fill the capital's K Street corridor with Republican lobbyists, and made it plain that those seeking to influence legislation would have to ''pay to play,'' in the form of political contributions and other largesse.

Mr. DeLay, who was himself indicted last year in Texas on unrelated campaign finance charges and forced to step down from his post as House majority leader, has long had close ties to Mr. Abramoff. Now Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea increases the likelihood that Mr. DeLay will lose his leadership post for good, and raises the prospect that he -- and other lawmakers -- may be enmeshed in new legal troubles. The sheer scale of Mr. Abramoff's misdeeds -- millions of dollars in kickbacks from Indian tribes, a luxury golf outing for politicians to Scotland, misuse of a tax-exempt foundation -- make this an extraordinary case.

''There are all sorts of things that have gone on of the same generic kind,'' said Harry C. McPherson, who came to Washington 50 years ago this month as a Senate aide to Lyndon B. Johnson and has plied his trade as a lawyer-lobbyist since leaving the White House in 1969. ''But this is truly a situation where the degree changes everything. It converts something that purists about government would find unpleasant into the utterly unacceptable -- into crime.''

But the problem is broader than Mr. Abramoff, Mr. DeLay or even the inherent potential for abuse in one-party rule of all three branches of government. It also has to do with the astounding growth of the lobbying industry, a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself. The rise of government regulation -- first in the New Deal and then in the 1960's and 70's -- spawned a parallel rise in the private sector's efforts to master the new system. Between the early 1970's and the mid-1980's, the number of trade associations doubled; in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the early 1990's, political donations from 19 major industries -- including pharmaceuticals, defense, commercial banking and accounting -- were split about evenly between the two parties.

By 2003, the Republicans held a 2-to-1 advantage. Since 1998, the center found, more than 2,200 former federal employees had registered as federal lobbyists, as had nearly 275 former White House aides and nearly 250 former members of Congress. Many rules governing their conduct remain deliberately vague, and the House Ethics Committee has been paralyzed because of dysfunction and partisan disputes.

''The scandal here is not that the rules were broken; the scandal is the rules themselves,'' said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, who with a Republican colleague, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Senators John McCain and Russell D. Feingold, has been a leader in pressing to overhaul campaign finance and ethics rules. ''Lobbying is part of our system, but there is a set of ethical standards and rules that ought to be followed.''